His name was Yungman.
The components of his name were, as custom dictated, selected by his paternal grandfather, just as his father’s had been selected by his grandfather, and so forth back to the origin of the clan. The grounding character “Yung”—“Hero”—cemented him to all his cousins (Yung-jo, Yung-ho, Yung-chun, Yungbok) in this twelfth generation of Kwaks, whether he knew them or not; “Man” meant “Evening.” “Evening Hero” would thus be carved into all the family trees on male Kwak headstones henceforth, chipped into his jade name-stick—his legal signature. Yungman’s place as first son was evident by contrast to his younger brother Yung-sik, “Vegetable Hero.”
To his patients, he was no Evening Hero but Dr. Kwak. A little Asian man (certainly short of stature, at 5'4"), the hospital’s obstetrician. He was distinctive to the white townspeople not just by being Asian but by being the first doctor from somewhere, anywhere, else. First North Korea, then South Korea. In America, a year first in Birmingham, Alabama, repeating his internship, as all foreign-trained physicians had to do.
And though he was a graduate of the “Harvard of Korea,” no hospital even bothered to reply to the American job search of this man from Asia, a region of the world America had decided it didn’t want and made laws to ban and expel. Yungman would end up so desperate for employment that he would drive straight north with his wife and infant child to this Arctic Circle of the US—the Iron Range of Minnesota—where winters were almost lightless, where schools closed for blizzards only when temperatures fell below minus fifty degrees.
Horse’s Breath, so named because the only way the early settlers (49ers who got lost on the way to California) could discern whether their horses were still alive that first winter was by checking for their breath, or alternatively, the name was a white man’s mangling of the Anishinaabe word ozhaawashkwaabika: the purplish undertone on the area’s rocks—signifying iron—which gave these speculators a reason to stay.
Towns in this area were spaced apart, individual stars in a constellation. A person from the next town over, Apple’s Gate, whose main characteristic to the Horse’s Breather was the unholy smell of rotten eggs from the paper plant, was a stranger. Movement between towns was rare.
Into Horse’s Breath’s mix of the descendants of the immigrants brought to work in the iron ore mines (Swedes, Norwegians, Finns, in that order; a Dane, three Icelanders, Slovakians, Slovenians, Serbians, Germans, Croatians, Poles, an Italian, and an Irish or two, and admixtures thereof) came Dr. Kwak, William (Will, I am) on his official documents; his Korean wife, Young-ae; and his Korean-ish son, Einstein.